A review of certain aspects of the background of the invention provides insight into how the invention operates and the benefits provided by the invention. A discussion of the types of shotgun ammunition types is presented, followed by a discussion of the shortcomings of the use of the shotgun as a tactical weapon by a soldier or law enforcement officer.
Description of Shotgun Ammunition Types
Shotguns have two general type of ammunition: slugs and shot. “Slug” shells are shotgun shells that fire a single, solid projectile. Slugs are either rifled rounds and fired through smoothbore barrels, or non-rifled rounds fired through rifled barrels. In the case of non-rifled slug rounds, the slug is encased in a sabot, which is a plastic ring or cylinder surrounding the slug. The sabot is gripped by the rifling of the barrel, thereby spinning the sabot and slug. The spinning motion stabilizes the slug during its flight towards the target; the sabot falls away from the slug when the round leaves the barrel of the firearm. Saboted slug rounds are often used for hunting game such as deer and are generally accurate and effective to 100 yards.
“Shot” shells are shotgun shells that contain a group of pellets (called the “shot”), made of either lead or a lead substitute material. The shot spreads into a shot pattern after leaving the barrel of the firearm, increasing the likelihood that at least one of the pellets will strike the target. The shot round is extremely effective at close ranges, but the pellets quickly lose their kinetic energy and lose their effectiveness the further they travel from the firearm. Thus, although a shot-loaded shotgun is effective at close ranges, it must be unloaded and then loaded with a slug shell if the target is outside the effective range of the shot shell. Shot generally takes the form of spherical pellets, but may sometimes exist as “cubic shot,” in which the pellets take the form of cubes. Cubic shot is used when a wider dispersal of the shot pellets is required since their cubic appearance causes them to “tumble” while in flight, making their trajectory more erratic than that of spherical shot pellets.
Additional types of shotgun ammunition include flechette rounds, in which the shot pellets are replaced by small darts, and disintegrator or “Hatton” rounds (in which the shot pellets are replaced by a mixture of metal powder and wax) which are used for breaching locked doors.
The “Combat” Shotgun
World War I saw the use of the Winchester Model 1897 pump-action shotgun by the United States military. These “combat” shotguns were loaded with buckshot shells, buckshot being a large-sized pellet loaded into the shell. Buckshot shells generally contained eight to nine pellets of buckshot where each pellet was about 0.3″ in diameter. The effectiveness of the combat shotgun made it an ideal weapon for close-range combat during trench warfare and its use continued in the U.S. military for certain applications. The shotgun is also used by law enforcement agencies should their officers be required to engage criminals in short-range firearms exchanges, such as those inside dwellings or buildings.
A soldier (or law enforcement officer) equipped with a combat shotgun faced one dilemma—how to neutralize an enemy who was outside the short, effective range of the buckshot-loaded shells he carried in his combat shotgun. This problem reduced the effectiveness of the combat shotgun-equipped soldier in that his weapon's range was severely limited, thereby making him both less able to defend himself against an enemy equipped with a rifle and making him unable to assist the other soldiers of his unit in certain situations. The soldier could carry slug shells into combat; he would, however, be burdened by more weight and would have to remove the buckshot shells from the combat shotgun and replace them with slug rounds whenever he encountered an enemy outside the range of his buckshot shells.